This is worth a read. It has definite applicability to corporate use of wiki and blog technology. The key paragraph is
The Wiki and the Blog are complimentary companion technologies that together form the core workspace that will allow intelligence officers to share, innovate, adapt, respond, and be—on occasion—brilliant. Blogs will cite Wiki entries. The occasional brilliant blog comment will shape the Wiki. The Blog will be vibrant, and make many sea changes in real-time. The Wiki, as it matures, will serve as corporate knowledge and will not be as fickle as the Blog. The Wiki will be authoritative in nature, while the Blog will be highly agile. The Blog is personal and opinionated. The Wiki is agreed-upon and corporate.
Andrus goes on to add additional supporting components to the core of blogs and wikis which consists of search, feedback, and an underlying document repository.
The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community. Bill Ives finds a nice report on the use of new technology within the intelligence community…
The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community. Here is an article by Calvin Andrus of the CIA on how they can use blogs and wikis to help them change, The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community, which is not a bad idea. As… [Portals and KM]
Note that the Stanford Law School link to the PDF does not require registration.
I definitely like the idea of using the repository as a sort of loosely organized collection point for raw knowledge. At Navigator we call this the “unstructured data warehouse”. It needs to be secure and I suppose it needs some amount of organization but the key is to make it easy for employees to contribute, easy to administer, and as open as possible.
Then, on top of that you add tools to glean intelligence from the warehouse (ie wikis) and a mechanism for expressing opinions about that separately (blogs). Index the whole shooting-match with a search engine and you’ve got something.
The final ingredient is incentive. You’ve got to make it beneficial for employees to leverage this infrastructure (and painful if they don’t!).